I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to messages, and, more particularly, to methods and systems for providing messages between computers.
II. Background of the Invention
For organizations to enable business agility, they must ensure that applications available to the enterprise are not only high-performance business applications driving efficiencies, but also that they become flexible building blocks of future business systems. One way of providing building blocks is through the use of services. A service, such as an application or web service, is a program that makes itself available to users over the Internet. Services typically implement standardized protocols, such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), although other protocols can be used. Moreover, there is usually some type of web mechanism, such as Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) that enables a client computer to readily locate the service and its public Application Program Interface (API). Although a service is usually provided over an Internet, the service may be accessed over an intranet.
Although services are often designed to expose functionality of individual applications, sometimes the functionality is too limited to be an efficient building block for enterprise-wide business processes. A solution to this limitation has been the use of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The SOA is a middleware, which builds on the benefits of services. A SOA allows abstraction of objects and Business Objects (BO), instantiated as services. The abstraction is a result of aggregating services into business-level enterprise services to provide more meaningful building blocks for the task of automating enterprise-scale business processes or scenarios. Enterprise services allow organizations to efficiently develop composite applications, such as applications that compose functionality and information from existing systems and services to support new business processes or scenarios. An example of a SOA is the Enterprise Service Framework (ESF) commercially available from SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany. The term “SOA” may also be used to refer to a “distributed objects” architecture, such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model).
A common model interface (CMI) may serve as a general interface for software layers used in applications, such as services. The software layers may include applications and databases from a variety of vendors. For example, a CMI may provide an interface between a user interface, such as Web Dynpro (commercially available from SAP AG), and a services infrastructure, such as the ESF. The CMI may allow various applications to work together, independent of the platform on which the applications are built.